by CeCe Osgood
Ross clucked his tongue. "Just like I thought. You were jealous and wanted revenge."
Guthrie fired off a "shut up" glance then turned to her. "We need to hear the details."
"I dropped by here a couple days ago. I knocked, but no one came to the door, and when I was leaving, I heard a dog barking in the back yard."
She sputtered out how she'd found the dog snarling at a kitten and how she'd frightened it off. "I heard a car, and I hid in the garage. I heard her go inside the house, and I decided to ask if the kitten was hers."
Guthrie pursed his mouth. "Did you show her the lipstick?"
Abby, after a moment of startled realization, shook her head. "I forgot. I totally forgot. I got so caught up with the kitten."
"Detectives!" shouted a female voice.
Abby and the men turned to see a stout woman with short gray hair standing near the right rear corner of the house. Her white uniform and neon blue latex gloves indicated she was part of the forensics team.
"Glad you finally made it here," she grumbled." She gestured at the backyard. "It's back here."
Ross and Guthrie hastened after her. Guthrie motioned for Abby to follow them.
In the backyard, near the tree where Abby had rescued the kitten, a police photographer was rapidly snapping off frames.
Guthrie held up a hand signaling Abby to halt.
"Wait here," he barked at her. Then he moved toward the object of interest lying on the ground.
Abby stealthily raised the camera and zoomed in on the object, but Guthrie kneeled down, blocking her view.
Chapter Twenty
When she tried to move for a better angle, a uniformed cop stalked toward her. "Drop that camera," he snapped.
She obeyed and let it hang from her neck. The cop planted himself right next to her, effectively keeping her from using the lens to identify the object.
Filled with frustration, Abby drove home pondering what they'd found. It had to be some type of evidence. But what?
At home, she picked two ripe tomatoes from the plants near her front steps and strolled inside to find Jill sitting on the staircase with her phone to her ear. "I'll be ready. Bye."
"Ready for what?"
"Dad's picking me up. He has a legal wingding on Sunday, so I'm going over there tonight."
Minutes later, they were gorging on tomato and mayo sandwiches. Between bites, Jill said, "Kendra's mom adds cucumbers too."
"Fran adds cucumbers? Alan liked cucumbers on his too. Maybe that's where he got it from. Fran."
Jill angled her head. "That's the most you've said since you got home. What's bugging you?"
"The cops found something in Bell Crichton's backyard."
Jill lifted her chin. "And that means what?"
"I don't know what it means, but I'd like to find out." Abby shared the details of her time at Bell's house with her daughter who then told her to let it go and stop obsessing.
"I can't help it. Curiosity is part of my personality. And yours too, kiddo." She tapped Jill's nose with her finger.
"I remember your early years, always asking questions. Mommy, why's the sky blue? Mommy, why do dogs drool? Mommy, why don't I have five thumbs on my hand instead of one?"
"And I never got an answer to that," Jill said with a pouty face.
Abby didn't respond. Her mind had drifted back to the question of Alan's whereabouts on that weekend in August. Was he with Bell? If he wasn't with her, would she know where he was?
"You should ask her."
"Who?"
"Bell."
Abby frowned. "How do you do that? Read my mind."
Jill shrugged. "I don't know. It just happens. Maybe it's a mother-daughter thing."
Abby shrugged. She didn't know if it was a mother-daughter thing. Her mother, Phoebe, had passed away when she was five, and, as far as she and her father knew, Phoebe had no living relatives.
The doorbell rang. Jill jumped up. "That's a shock. Dad getting here early."
As she hurried to open the door, Abby contemplated asking Charles for a favor. Would he do it? Would he snoop for her? Find out what the police found in Bell's back yard?
Her cautious side answered in a split second. Asking Charles for a favor would bring on an endless lecture and, from then on, he would use it as a bargaining chip. It just wasn't worth it.
"Hey, Dad. Lemme get my backpack." She raced up the stairs. Charles stood rooted to the spot on the walkway with his hands in his pockets.
Abby took her sweet time to finish eating her sandwich before meandering to the door.
Her ex-husband's impassive expression didn't change as she approached. There was no glance her way or any attempt at a polite greeting.
Abby said, "You're gone Sunday?"
Charles responded with a shrug. "We're leaving Saturday afternoon. I'll take Jill riding in the morning so we can spend some time together."
Jill came downstairs swinging her army green backpack. "I might have Dad drop me off at tennis tomorrow if I'm feeling athletic. I'll text you."
"As always, pumpkin, be careful," Abby said, pecking Jill's cheek.
Later that night, she was on the couch in the glow of the muted flat screen indulging in the original version of MacGyver when her cellphone rang.
She almost let it go to voicemail, but the tiny voice in the back of her head insisted she get it. She picked up, saw the ID. "Jill? You okay?"
"Yeah. I'm fine."
Abby could hear a hint of annoyance in her daughter's voice. "What's up?"
"You know. Larissa. Being around her can be such an ordeal. Anyway, I called because I overheard Dad talking to her, and I thought you might want to know this nugget of info."
Jill's conspiratorial tone had Abby inhaling a deep breath. If this was something personal, something about their marriage, she wasn't sure if she wanted to know.
Curiosity, however, reared its impertinent, inquisitive head and pricked her hesitation. "I'm listening," she said.
"Dad had lunch with some police bigwig, and Dad told Larissa the guy mentioned Bell Crichton."
Abby perked up. "Tell me more."
"The cops found a vial in her back yard."
"A vial of what?"
"Ammy toxin. I haven't had a chance to search for it online."
"I'll do that."
After a quick goodbye, Abby flew to her laptop. It wasn't ammytoxin. It was amatoxin, and it was found in certain mushrooms. An infinitesimal amount could cause liver damage. An amount the size of a dime meant death.
Chapter Twenty-one
After an addictive hour of online reading about numerous accidental and intentional deaths from mushrooms, Abby came to a conclusion: "Not the way I want to go. No way, no how."
Shutting down the laptop, she refused to think about the amatoxin anymore for the night. Instead, she surfed TV channels and settled on Chopped.
Oddly enough, mushrooms were a featured ingredient for the episode. A brief flash of lightning outside caught her attention. Rain was in the forecast. It was after eleven when she turned off the TV and started upstairs.
"Ow!" she cried, when her big toe hit something on the stairs. She bent down and picked up a book. It was the one she'd found on her bed, the velvety black book with ornate golden swirls on the front cover. How did it get down here? It must've fallen out of Jill's backpack.
There was no title on the cover, just golden twirls and swirls. She opened book, found the first page had more swirls and curls, but as she stared at the design, the title became decipherable. Tick Tock: A Memory Block.
She frowned. It sounded like a children's book. Deciding to look at it later, she went into her bedroom, tossed the book on her bed and peeled out of her clothes, a hot bath foremost in her mind.
Later that night, clad in a long white sleep shirt, she crawled under the comforter and, yawning, was reaching up to turn off the brass lamp on her nightstand when she heard a faint voice inside her head whispering tick tock, tick tock.
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Her fingers stilled on the lamp's switch and an image of the velvety black book pushed into her mind. Sitting up, she spotted it lying where she'd tossed it on the bed and felt strangely drawn to it. She picked it up. When her finger traced the golden swirls on the cover, a little shiver ran through her and a rhyme popped into her mind. A Memory Block. You'll never know, if you don't let go. Tick Tock. A Memory Block. You'll never know, if you don't let go.
It was like a song lyric that had gotten stuck in her head.
Offhandedly, she flipped through the pages and was shocked by a faint "tsk tsk" sound as if the book were admonishing her. Startled, she dropped it.
After a long silent moment of staring at the thin black volume, she laughed at herself for overreacting. The sound must've come from the way she'd moved on the bed, friction of her butt against the sheets.
She picked the book up again, but instead of flipping through the pages, she lifted each one gently.
All the pages were blank, except for the first page and the last page. On the first was the title. The last page had a phrase written in the same swirly cursive.
It didn't even look like English. Then she saw that it was. Just really swirly English.
In the grasp of harm, ask the East Wind to quell your alarm.
"Jill's writing poetry," she mumbled. "That's why it's mostly blank pages. It's a journal."
Yawning, she set the book on her nightstand to remind herself to give it to Jill in the morning.
Her eyes blinked open. She was panting from panic. The nightmare had returned. She'd been flying high in the sky then suddenly plummeted down to a mist-covered earth. But there was more to the dream this time.
When she hit the ground, she couldn't move her limbs. She was prone on the grass, her eyes suddenly pinned on something swaying close to her face. The mist began to fade revealing a two-foot tall mushroom now tipping its death cap toward her.
Before she could blink, it spewed a moldy dark spray of poison into her mouth causing her tongue to burst into flames.
"It's only a dream," she muttered and skittered out of the bed. "Just a dream," she muttered again and again until she was calmer and able to laugh at herself.
Snagging her robe from the closet, she shrugged into it before heading downstairs.
While the coffee brewed, she yanked the mop from the broom closet to tackle the drips of rainwater that had flown through the window she'd forgotten to close last night. Outside, the sun had already dried out most of the rain-soaked ground, although there were a few puddles here and there.
The rhythmic back-and-forth movement of the mopping calmed her. She moved a chair to get to the water spots under the kitchen table and was struck by something, something that intrigued her.
Donning sweatpants and a tee shirt, she drove to the grocery store.
Murmuring a "hello" to a clerk she recognized, she hurried to the produce area. Her gaze swept over the varieties of mushrooms. "So harmless looking."
Of course, these were harmless.
They'd been grown for the consumer market by people who knew how to distinguish the deadly toxic 'shrooms from the edible ones.
Last night, she read a lot of stories online and had been deeply disturbed by the number of people who picked seemingly innocuous mushrooms somewhere out in a field and then dropped them into a salad or soup, assuring themselves they could tell the difference.
But the lethal fungus often proved them wrong.
She touched the spongy top of a large portobello then jerked her finger away. No way would she ever eat a mushroom again, not after that nightmare.
Moving down the aisle to the citrus, she selected a half dozen lemons.
Shortly after three in the afternoon, a scowling Detective Guthrie arrived at Abby's house. He was out of his usual garb, a dark rumpled suit. Instead he had on dad jeans and a knit shirt. He'd been leaving his grandson's soccer game when he responded to Abby's text.
"What is it you have to say, Ms. Little?"
"Come in." She gestured, noticing the change in his expression as he got a whiff of the lemony aroma wafting from the kitchen.
He breathed in deeply and said, "You didn't?"
She beamed. "I did."
He followed her into the kitchen; she motioned for him to pull out a chair at the little round table. "How was your grandson's game?"
"Four-year-olds running the wrong way. It was fun."
Abby opened the oven door, removed the pan and placed it on a cooling rack. The first batch had already cooled, so she already had a plateful.
He squinted up at her as she set the plate on the table. "Lemon squares." She could hear the love in his voice.
"I know you're dieting but—"
His brisk wave dismissed any notion of that being a factor. "I cheat once in a while. My wife said I could."
Guthrie gave her a serious look although there was a hint of mirth in his voice. "Is this a bribe, Ms. Little?"
Abby batted her eyelashes and exuded a studied innocence. "No, sir. Merely a snack while we chat."
His face told her he didn't believe a word of it but wasn't opposed to listening while he indulged. He popped a fragrant fat one in his mouth with a pleasurable moan.
"Would you like coffee or milk with that?"
He chewed, swallowed, and mumbled something that sounded like milk as he reached for another one.
Abby brought him a tumbler and settled into the chair across from him with her coffee.
Guthrie ate two more lemon squares and gulped down half the milk before leaning back in his chair. "Okay, you've made me happy. Now, why did you call me?"
"I have something important to tell you."
He kept a neutral expression, said nothing.
Abby handed him a napkin. "For your milk mustache."
Guthrie wiped his mouth and tossed her an expectant look. "Well? Let's have it."
"Remember, I told you I rescued a kitten in Bell Crichton's back yard."
He nodded.
"It was clinging to a tree limb out of my reach. I had to find something to stand on, so I went into Bell's garage, and I found a folding chair."
Guthrie's gaze strayed to the plate of lemon bars. "Your point is?"
"This morning, I was mopping up some rain water on the floor because I had left a window open last night. As I was mopping under a chair, something occurred to me.
"When I was getting the kitten down, I put the chair right where your people found that"—she didn't want to be specific and say vial—"object. I can remember scanning for a dry spot on the ground since there were puddles around the tree from the rain the night before."
She paused, and then dramatically lifted her right hand. "I swear, Detective, I did not see anything on the ground when I put that folding chair down, especially not a vial."
Oops, that was a mistake. I didn't want him to know that I knew it was a vial since he might ask me how I found it out.
The detective lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes. "How’d you know it's a vial? How’d you come by that piece of information?"
Abby gnawed on her bottom lip. "I really can't say."
His mouth curved downward, but he didn't press her. Abby continued. "My point is, I didn't see a vial on the ground. It wasn't there."
Guthrie's skepticism became apparent in the tilt of his head.
"It wasn't there," she said again, more adamant. "The dog stood on the dry spot. There were puddles all around and when the dog ran off, I positioned the chair right there on that exact same spot. There was no vial on the ground then."
Guthrie reached for another lemon square. His hand stalled momentarily, as if he was admonishing himself, then proceeded to scoop up the treat. "Do you know what's in the vial?"
Abby averted her gaze. Guthrie read her expression. "You somehow seem to have access to privileged information."
Abby pressed her lips together.
"So that's it," Guthrie said. "That's what you wanted me to know."
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Her forehead creased into a deep frown. "That means someone put it there later. Right?"
Guthrie said nothing.
"There's something else. I noticed a collage of photographs over her fireplace mantel. In one of them, she's wearing a cheerleader uniform and sitting on the shoulders of two football players. The boy on the right reminded me of Alan."
"You believe Bell and the victim knew each other in high school?"
"It's a possibility. That's why I went to her house with the camera. I wanted to zoom in on the uniforms to find a mascot or a logo or something to identify the school. I figured I'd try to dig up info to confirm my theory. Maybe even find a school yearbook. Unfortunately, you and Detective Ross stopped me before I could accomplish my mission."
Guthrie leaned back, his expression unreadable. "Mission, eh? Perhaps I should get the department to issue you a gold shield and a service weapon."
"Now, now. No need to get huffy." She nudged the plate of lemon squares closer to him.
The detective couldn't resist and nabbed a chubby corner square.
Abby let herself speculate. "Let's say something happened back in high school between Bell and Alan, and then they met again recently."
Guthrie ate slowly, his attention on Abby. "What if she kept a grudge and deliberately lured him into an affair, so she could dump him?"
She wiggled a finger. "But he dumped her first which enraged Bell, and that's when she set out to kill him."
Guthrie managed a noncommittal shrug.
Abby pressed him. "My assumption is you identified her prints at Alan's. That's why you took her in for questioning. You wanted to see if her alibi, if she had one, would hold up."
When he said nothing, she continued, a teeny bit annoyed that he wasn't giving her any hints if she was on the right track. "I assume that her alibi didn't hold up, and that's why you searched her place, and when the vial was found, you arrested her. Did I assume correctly?"
He squinted at her. "Ms. Little, what are the first three letters of assumption?"
"That's not an answer, Detective." Abby reached for a lemon square, stopped and glanced at him. "Did Bell confess?"